Science

Newswise — Cambridge, MA— A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the Universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Caltech have shown that more than three-quarters of the Universe's ordinary matter has been hiding in the thin gas between galaxies, marking a major step forward in understanding how matter interacts and behaves in the Universe. They’ve used the new data to make the first detailed measurement of ordinary matter distribution across the cosmic web.

"The decades-old 'missing baryon problem' was never about whether the matter existed," said Liam Connor, CfA astronomer and lead author of the new study. "It was always: Where is it? Now, thanks to FRBs, we know: three-quarters of it is floating between galaxies in the cosmic web." In other words, scientists now know the home address of the “missing” matter.

And this is just the beginning for FRB cosmology. "We're entering a golden age," said Ravi, who also serves as the co-PI of Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array-110 (DSA-110). "Next-generation radio telescopes like the DSA-2000 and the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector will detect thousands of FRBs, allowing us to map the cosmic web in incredible detail."

The study is published today in Nature Astronomy.

Extractive activity in international waters – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be banned forever, according to top scientists.

The high seas, the vast international waters beyond national jurisdiction, remain largely unprotected and are increasingly threatened.

Writing in the journal Nature, Professor Callum Roberts and co-authors argue that stopping all extractive activity in international waters would prevent irreversible damage to marine biodiversity, the climate, and ocean equity.

This would also be a decisive step toward achieving the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, as set out in the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022.

“Life in the high seas is vital to the ocean’s ability to store carbon and is too important to lose,” said lead author Professor Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter and lead researcher with the Convex Seascape Survey. “This paper makes the case that we must stop extractive activities in the high seas permanently, to protect the climate, restore biodiversity and safeguard ocean function for future generations.”

Direct link to the image in the browser: https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap/?ra=150.1203188&dec=2.1880050&zoom=2

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In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday has released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.

“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before,” said UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” she said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 galaxies released by NASA in 2004, “our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large.” An animated zoom-out from the center of the COSMOS-Web field to a full-size comparison between COSMOS-Web and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

The COSMOS-Web composite image reaches back about 13.5 billion years; according to NASA, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, give or take one hundred million years. That covers about 98% of all cosmic time. The objective for the researchers was not just to see some of the most interesting galaxies at the beginning of time but also to see the wider view of cosmic environments that existed during the early universe, during the formation of the first stars, galaxies and black holes.

“The cosmos is organized in dense regions and voids,” Casey explained. “And we wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies; we wanted to get that broader context of where they lived.” A 'big surprise'

And what a cosmic neighborhood it turned out to be. Before JWST turned on, Casey said, she and fellow astronomers made their best predictions about how many more galaxies the space telescope would be able to see, given its 6.5 meter (21 foot) diameter light-collecting primary mirror, about six times larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meter (7 foot, 10 in) diameter mirror. The best measurements from Hubble suggested that galaxies within the first 500 million years would be incredibly rare, she said.

“It makes sense — the Big Bang happens and things take time to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to turn on. There’s a timescale associated with that,” Casey explained. “And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We’re also seeing supermassive black holes that are not even visible with Hubble.” And they’re not just seeing more, they’re seeing different types of galaxies and black holes, she added.

“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen." 

'Lots of unanswered questions'

While the COSMOS-Web images and catalog answer many questions astronomers have had about the early universe, they also spark more questions.

“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen,” Casey said. “So, lots of details to unpack, and lots of unanswered questions.”

In releasing the data to the public, the hope is that other astronomers from all over the world will use it to, among other things, further refine our understanding of how the early universe was populated and how everything evolved to the present day. The dataset may also provide clues to other outstanding mysteries of the cosmos, such as dark matter and physics of the early universe that may be different from what we know today.

“A big part of this project is the democratization of science and making tools and data from the best telescopes accessible to the broader community,” Casey said. The data was made public almost immediately after it was gathered, but only in its raw form, useful only to those with the specialized technical knowledge and the supercomputer access to process and interpret it. The COSMOS collaboration has worked tirelessly for the past two years to convert raw data into broadly usable images and catalogs. In creating these products and releasing them, the researchers hope that even undergraduate astronomers could dig into the material and learn something new.

“Because the best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently,” Casey said. “It’s not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries.” Image Caitlin Casey wears a puffy coat in front of a lake Photo Credit Courtesy Photo Caitlin Casey

Caitlin Casey is an observational astronomer with expertise in high-redshift galaxies. She uses the most massive and unusual galaxies at early times to test fundamental properties of galaxy assembly (including their gas, stars, and dust) within a ΛCDM cosmological framework. Read more

For the COSMOS collaboration, the exploration continues. They’ve headed back to the deep field to further map and study it.

“We have more data collection coming up,” she said. “We think we have identified the earliest galaxies in the image, but we need to verify that.” To do so, they’ll be using spectroscopy, which breaks up light from galaxies into a prism, to confirm the distance of these sources (more distant = older). “As a byproduct,” Casey added, “we’ll get to understand the interstellar chemistry in these systems through tracing nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. There’s a lot left to learn and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”

The COSMOS-Web image is available to browse interactively ; the accompanying scientific papers have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01216-7

A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells.

The virus’s ability to conceal itself inside certain white blood cells has been one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a cure. It means there is a reservoir of the HIV in the body, capable of reactivation, that neither the immune system nor drugs can tackle.

Now researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, have demonstrated a way to make the virus visible, paving the way to fully clear it from the body.

It is based on mRNA technology, which came to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was used in vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers have shown for the first time that mRNA can be delivered into the cells where HIV is hiding, by encasing it in a tiny, specially formulated fat bubble. The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus.

TL;DR

Conclusion

We have searched for evidence of the effect of gravity on the motion of particles of neutral antimatter. The best fit to our measurements yields a value of (0.75 ± 0.13 (statistical + systematic) ± 0.16 (simulation)) g for the local acceleration of antimatter towards the Earth. We conclude that the dynamic behaviour of antihydrogen atoms is consistent with the existence of an attractive gravitational force between these atoms and the Earth. From the asymptotic form of the distribution of the likelihood ratio as a function of the presumed acceleration, we estimate a probability of 2.9 × 10−4 that a result, at least as extreme as that observed here, could occur under the assumption that gravity does not act on antihydrogen. The probability that our data are consistent with the repulsive gravity simulation is so small as to be quantitatively meaningless (less than 10−15). Consequently, we can rule out the existence of repulsive gravity of magnitude 1g between the Earth and antimatter. The results are thus far in conformity with the predictions of General Relativity. Our results do not support cosmological models relying on repulsive matter–antimatter gravitation.

https://archive.is/K5mdP

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

A German experiment proved that simple concrete spheres make fantastic batteries. Now, California plans to submerge a 9-meter diameter sphere in the ocean and is already planning versions of 30 meters. - farmingdale-observer.com/2025/…

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

The load-shedding that happened in Texas during the 2021 Snowpacolypse was (according to ERCOT) to avoid this precise situation. It was sold (somewhat retroactively) as millions being without power for a week was better than the months a black start could take.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

If left unchallenged, a rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world1.

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat — by modifying approaches to genetics education, advocating for science, establishing and leading diverse research teams and ensuring that studies embrace and build on the insights obtained about human variation.

Galaxy Lenses Galaxy from Webb

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2504/GalaxiesLens/_Webb/_960.jpg

Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center. But in the featured image, something more rare is going on. Here, the central light-colored elliptical galaxy is much closer than the blue and red-colored spiral galaxy that surrounds it. This can happen when near and far galaxies are exactly aligned, causing the gravity of the near galaxy to pull the light from the far galaxy around it in an effect called gravitational lensing. The featured galaxy double was taken by the Webb Space Telescope and shows a complete Einstein ring, with great detail visible for both galaxies. Galaxy lenses like this can reveal new information about the mass distribution of the foreground lens and the light distribution of the background source.

Attribution:

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Painting with Jupiter

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2504/PIA21983JupiterLundh1024.jpg

In digital brush strokes, Jupiter's signature atmospheric bands and vortices were used to form this interplanetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image from citizen scientist Rick Lundh uses data from the Juno spacecraft's JunoCam. To paint on the digital canvas, a JunoCam image with contrasting light and dark tones was chosen for processing and an oil-painting software filter applied. The image data was captured during perijove 10. That was Juno's December 16, 2017 close encounter with the solar system's ruling gas giant. At the time the spacecraft was cruising about 13,000 kilometers above northern Jovian cloud tops. Now in an extended mission, Juno has explored Jupiter and its moons since entering orbit around Jupiter in July of 2016.

Attribution:

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Comet C/2025 F2 SWAN

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2504/C2025/_F2SWAN/_20250414/_DEBartlett1024.jpg

In late March, the comet now designated C/2025 F2 SWAN was found independently by citizen scientists Vladimir Bezugly, Michael Mattiazzo, and Rob Matson while examining publicly available image data from the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) camera on the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Comet SWAN's coma, its greenish color a signature of diatomic carbon molecules fluorescing in sunlight, is at lower left in this telescopic image. SWAN's faint ion tail extends nearly two degrees toward the upper right across the field of view. The interplanetary scene was captured in clear but moonlit skies from June Lake, California on April 14. Seen against background of stars toward the constellation Andromeda, the comet was then some 10 light-minutes from our fair planet. Now a target for binoculars and small telescopes in northern hemisphere morning skies this comet SWAN is headed for a perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, on May 1. That will bring this visitor from the distant Oort cloud almost as close to the Sun as the orbit of inner planet Mercury.

Attribution: Dan Bartlett

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In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid.

No one had captured footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She didn’t spot one on this voyage either.

On the day she left the ship, though, Dr. Bolstad, a deep sea cephalopod biologist, learned about a recent video taken on March 9 from the South Sandwich Islands. A team searching for new marine life and remotely using a Schmidt Ocean Institute submersible, had happened upon a young cephalopod, and people wanted Dr. Bolstad’s help identifying it.

The juvenile was about 30 centimeters long (a little less than a foot), with a transparent body, delicate arms and brown spots. It was a colossal squid.

“Pretty much as soon as I saw the footage, I knew there was a good chance,” Dr. Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, said. She consults remotely for Schmidt’s Antarctic work.

It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.

https://archive.is/ZoGpY

Archive link

In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

https://archive.is/UrZ0a